Food is the new rock? We wine people are smirking

So this week, the notion of food being the new rock became a thing . Maybe it was a good thing, maybe it was a bad thing. Whatever. It was a thing.

You see, though, this notion of dishes becoming the new albums — things to catalog and collect and completely nerd out over? Old hat to wine people. We’ve been nerding out over esoterica for decades. Food is the new rock? Chefs are the new rock stars? Maybe. One thing I can tell you for sure: Wine has been burdened with this level of potentially unhealthy obsession since well before Proust fetishized that damn madeleine.

This has nothing to do with the way that wine, or food, fit into our lives. The second is rather mandatory, the first utterly optional but pleasing — except to those who could no more live without wine in their lives than music nerds could live without a pair of oversized headphones and a 160GB iPod.

It’s curious just how much currency winemakers have gained in the past 15 years. But winemakers as the new rock stars? That might be overstating it. Dial back a generation and you’d be hard-pressed to find winemakers treated with the utter reverence they are now. Chateaux and domaines had a certain fame. You could geek out over Haut-Brion or Biondi Santi, but the most famous wines in the world were typically crafted by a humble cellarmaster in the employ of the well-heeled, not much different than chefs of a generation ago were merely in service to their restaurants. Superstar consultants? Flying winemakers? Give me a break.

Fetishization had to come. The winemaker — or nowadays, the back-to-roots vigneron whose hipster cred is impeccable — has become our Matt Berninger.

But that analogy is way too easy.

The very way in which we catalog our endless tastes of wine, the way in which we use it to mark defining moments, is no different than how we relate to music. Do you remember what you were listening to/what you were drinking when _____ ? Of course you do, if you’re one of those types that fetishizes either. (Or both. The OCD nature of collecting aesthetics means that wine nerds and music nerds have a healthy overlapping Venn diagram.) The first time I heard Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”? Right then I began dreaming of coming west to California (so, yeah, you can blame him). And it was only after a taste of Hubert Lamy’s Saint-Aubin that I began thinking there really was something to this white Burgundy thing.

The nature of the collector is to veer from obvious and important to unknown and fresh. You might be the sort of person to curate obsessively over your love for U2 or Bob Dylan, down to the last obscure Japanese import and acoustic set. If so, you’re also probably ready to tell me why Guigal’s La Mouline trumps La Landonne or about Gaja’s exploration into Cabernet (Darmagi) or how Bryant Family’s best years really were under Helen Turley.

Just as likely, you’ve moved on. So please, explain why Stereolab’s “Aluminum Tunes” is actually the one compilation that I need to own. Also why the unsulfured bottling of Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon is the only one worth drinking. (For the record, I do own “Aluminum Tunes.” I have somehow survived with the sulfured Lapierre.)

Wine people have gotten so used to a rock level of nerdy that esoterica is our lingua franca. If food people are figuring this out just now, well, welcome to the club. Would you like some Perez Barquero amontillado with your kimchi dog?

When we all start to feel a bit uncomfortable (that means you, Gawker) is in realizing that most of the rest of the world doesn’t care. For every obsessive who needs to dwell on the cornicione at Gialina, which vintage of Littorai’s One Acre is ready to drink or whether the National should never have stopped playing smaller venues, there are several who will contentedly dial up Domino’s, uncork a bottle of Barefoot to go along and listen to whatever crap Pandora sends their way.

But then, fetishizers of any sort can be a drag. Remember John Cusack’s character in “High Fidelity”? It would have been frighteningly easy — if boring — to revise Nick Hornby’s original tale in a wine shop. (N.B., it wasn’t Rob’s knowledge of music that was a drag. It was him using it as a shield.)

So long as we don’t become painfully annoying to our friends or ignite flame wars on chat boards, it’s all in good fun. And if some of our food counterparts are just now discovering that healthy obsession is the endgame of flattery, all I can say is: Welcome to our nerdy little club. Have a glass of Trousseau Gris. Relax.